“Words cannot express how overcome I was. She has, of course, nothing but her reputation. How bitterer than a serpent’s tooth is a slanderous tongue! I asked her who started it, but she would not tell me for fear I would attack him, which would make matters worse. I would have done so, too; at least I would have demanded a retraction. Before I knew it we were engaged.
“I am not sorry. How lonely my life has been! Perhaps I have at last found happiness where I least expected it. She is a good, honest, capable woman, and she says she’s going to begin exercising to reduce her weight. I fear I am unworthy. Would that I could adore her more! Everything is not just as I imagined love to be; but I am not sorry. I should be happy in my good fortune. It is not good for man to live alone.
‘Duty is an Archangel on the right-hand side of God.’
Nevertheless, it was a much chastened, even saddened, Mr. Francis who returned to work the following morning. He had lived in his dreams, his romances had been the deepest and sweetest part of his life, for so long that such a reality as his engagement to Mrs. Benson hurt him through and through.
Perhaps any reality in the matter of romance would have hurt him. He had become a confirmed dreamer, even as he had become a confirmed bachelor, and he was not fitted to cope with practical details. Even the preparations, the hundred and one rather sordid arrangements, he would have had to go through in order to marry his latest ideal would probably have saddened him a good deal. It was thrice in vain that he attempted to be practical in the matter of marriage with Mrs. Benson; he suffered by every necessary preparation that brushed the star-dust off the butterfly’s wings of his dream ideal of love--suffered agonies that gave him a feeling of weakness in the diaphragm and in the knees.
Until eleven o’clock he was busy with the morning instalment of traveling-salesmen who came to offer their wares. This duty disposed of, he strolled out into the department where he was supposed to oversee the stock and clerks. Wicked hopes that she, the lady of his dream romance, would return he suppressed so firmly that he had a continuous ache in his throat. Gone were his shimmering dreams, his vistas of poetic reverie. He threw himself desperately into the business of arranging displays, stationing clerks, verifying price-tags. He was thoroughly melancholy and businesslike and stern-faced and miserable.